Author: CNN Newsource

By Kennedy Cook

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    ENGLEWOOD, Colorado (KCNC) — At Brookdale Meridian Englewood, residents gathered to celebrate Valentine’s Day with music, dancing, and heartfelt moments. Among them were Syl and Margaret Walorski, a Colorado couple whose love story has spanned decades.

“We’ve been married 70 years,” Syl said proudly.

Though they now call Brookdale Meridian Englewood home, their romance began generations ago under very different circumstances.

Syl was drafted into the military and sent to Arkansas for basic training. On weekends, soldiers would gather at the local USO club for dances; a welcome break from the demands of service. It was there, on a lively dance floor, that he first met Margaret.

“I was drafted. They sent me to Arkansas, and that’s where I had my basic training,” Syl recalled. “On weekends, they had dances at the USO club (…) and that’s where I met Margaret.”

Their romance began with music and movement, even if it wasn’t always easy.

“Yeah, we danced,” Margaret laughed. “But it’s hard to dance to that music and carry oxygen!”

Decades later, they’re still swaying together, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

“We are here today celebrating Valentine’s Day, the day of love,” one organizer said. “We’re having a Valentine’s Day dance.”

The celebration featured a special performance by the James Barela Swing Quartet as the room was adorned with festive decorations, and sweet treats added to the cheerful atmosphere.

“It’s most important to make these people feel like they’re young again,” an event organizer shared. “Dancing to their music and getting to hold their loved ones that they’ve been with; that’s what it’s all about.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Conor Wight

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    MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — On the same day that federal officials announced the end of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, a nightmare began for a family in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights.

Early Thursday afternoon, a security camera captured Jesus Flores leaving his home to help people on the street suffering from apparent car trouble.

Moments later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swarmed his driveway.

“[They] tricked him into coming outside,” said Flores’ son, Miguel.

Miguel and his mother, Dionicia, are heartbroken. Dionicia said that her husband is a lifeline for their six children; two of them have autism and require special care.

She said that the family provider was whisked away to El Paso, Texas — likely in violation of a federal judge’s order — within 48 hours of his detainment.

Flores is a mechanic, Miguel explained, who often takes odd jobs for people who know how to get hold of him. Flores’ family believes that the two people caught on a neighbor’s security camera checking underneath their hood in front of the Flores household are ICE agents themselves, luring Flores outside in order to detain him.

The video shows that as he begins examining the vehicle, two other cars fly in and come to a screeching halt, blocking the street on both sides. Flores appears to try to run back inside before multiple agents apprehend him. As they leave, the original car and the people feigning mechanical difficulties leave with them.

It’s incidents like this that have left some skeptical about the true extent to which people can let their guard down. Homan said that a “footprint” of federal officers will remain as operations transition back to the typical field office structure and to provide security for ICE agents in the field. He also emphasized that immigration enforcement will continue even as he said thousands of agents would begin leaving the metro.

Flores had spent recent weeks hunkering down at home, trying to avoid being swept up. His family said that he is undocumented and was deported once before about 16 years ago, leaving them with little hope that he will return home to Minnesota this time.

“My dad’s a hard-working individual,” Miguel said. “He came here to give us a better life. He has done that.”

WCCO reached out to ICE to request information about Flores and the apparent ruse that led to his detainment. As of Sunday afternoon, the agency has not responded.

Also on Thursday, Edward Lopez Mendez said that ICE pulled him over in Savage, Minnesota. In a video he captured from the driver seat, a federal officer tells him “maybe the operation stops, immigration does not stop.”

“They said they were looking for criminals. We’re not criminals,” Mendez told WCCO.

According to Mendez, he and a friend were leaving a property in Savage when ICE stopped them. Mendez, currently waiting for the next steps in an asylum-seeking process that he began in 2019, said that the ICE agents told him they were looking for someone at a specific address. Mendez said that the address did not match the house. After looking him up in their system, the agents let him go.

Mendez said he doesn’t believe the surge has really ended.

“[Homan’s announcement] doesn’t mean anything,” Mendez said.

A GoFundMe account has been set up to help support the Flores family.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Briseida Holguin

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    FORT WORTH, Texas (KTVT) — A group of Buddhist monks who walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., spreading a message of peace, returned home Saturday morning.

Thousands of people welcomed them back as they arrived at the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth.

The “Walk for Peace” was led by Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara, who said completing the 15‑week journey was emotional.

“In front of the gate, I was touched, and, emotions by so many people coming out,” said Pannakara.

The message behind the walk was simple: peace and mindfulness.

“It is something that people really needed at this time… The more we react, the more we suffer, so our message is to ask people slow down, slow down, look back within. Feel each and every heartbeat. See each and every breath going in and out. That is when peace begins,” said Pannakara.

The group of 19 began the trek in October.

“Every day we start at 4 a.m., we wake up and do our thing, chanting and meditation, and then, about six something, we start to walk. There are days that we walk 20 miles, there’s days that we walk 25, there’s days that we walk 32 miles,” said Pannakara.

Along the route, two monks were injured. One was struck by a car near Houston.

“He got his leg amputated, and so he cannot walk anymore, but he’s waiting to put the artificial leg in. He did join us in Washington DC,” said Pannakara.

The message continues beyond the walk.

Thousands followed the journey online, and Pannakara said the work is not finished. He believes anyone can take part in creating peace.

“Today is going to be my peaceful day. Tell the universe that. Tell the universe that today is going to be my peaceful day, so no one in is world can mess it up,” said Pannakara.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Barry Pintar

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    PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — It’s something most people have experienced at one time or another: losing your wallet.

With so much in our wallets, IDs, credit cards, and even cash, going through the hassle of replacing all of that can be a massive headache.

Just a few days ago, in Coraopolis, a wallet was lost while the piles of snow still covered the ground, meaning the wallet truly could’ve been anywhere.

Thanks to the effort and spirit of one U.S. Postal Service worker going above and beyond, this lost wallet found its way home.

At 25, Bruce Armah is a new postal worker, and when he found a wallet buried in the snow on a frigid winter morning, he tucked it away until he could look for an ID card or anything with an identifying address.

After he finished his workday, on his own time, he got into his car and began driving to the address.

“It was my father’s good deeds,” Armah said. “If you find someone’s property, and you return it. He lost his wallet, and someone returned it to him, so I was just returning the favor. I was happy to return the wallet.”

However, the story doesn’t end with Armah pulling up to the house and returning the wallet. Once he arrived, he learned the owner of the wallet had moved away – and not just a few blocks away.

The owner of the wallet lives in McDonald, and so Armah drives there, because that’s what his father would’ve done.

Armah then finds the new address and knocks on the door. That’s when Matt Bryan came to the door, knowing his wife was sick over losing her wallet somewhere earlier that day.

“There was $100 cash in there, credit cards, ID, healthcare cards,” Matt recalled. “He wanted nothing in return; he just said it was the right thing to do.”

In all, Armah drove from Coraopolis to Clinton, to McDonald, and to Ambridge, 52 miles in total, on his own time, in his own car, making his father proud as well as his fellow postal workers.

“They’ve got 8,000, 9,000 deliveries, and they’re walking 13 miles per day, then they get put on overtime, which is another two hours, and another five miles every day, so at the end of the day, they’re pretty spent,” said Thomas Redlinger, a safety specialist at USPS. “With the weather, I know we’re getting a bad rap right now, but with the weather, I think we’re doing a tremendous job.”

Armah is a quiet mail carrier who did this all on his own and told no one about it.

Matt Bryan, however, told a postal worker friend, who told another, and another, until it ended up becoming a legend.

“I was complimenting him to some of his coworkers who mentioned it up the chain, which gets us to this point,” Bryan said. “I can’t thank him enough; it’s great to see that young people are doing the right thing.”

“He asked me why I returned the wallet, and I was like, it’s my father’s good deed,” Armah added.

In spite of the snow, in spite of the sub-zero temperatures, Armah went above and beyond to do a good deed he learned from his father.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Jim DeFede

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    PARKLAND, Florida (WFOR) — In the eight years since Alyssa Alhadeff and Alex Schachter were murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their parents have worked tirelessly to turn their grief into action and to try to keep the tragedy that left 17 people dead from happening again.

Lori Alhadeff took her pain and ran for the Broward School Board, where she has spent years working to make schools safer not only in Florida but across the country. She has pushed for the passage of Alyssa’s Law, which requires a silent alarm system in classrooms that teachers can activate to alert police and fire rescue if there is anything from an active shooter to a medical emergency.

So far, 10 states have passed Alyssa’s Law. Lori Alhadeff was in Washington, D.C. last week, where Alyssa’s Act was introduced, which would create standards for such systems across the country.

“We have passed Alyssa’s law in 10 states, which is panic buttons in schools directly linked to law enforcement, so they can get there faster. Time equals life,” she told CBS News Miami. “And then with Alyssa’s Act at the federal level, we will create standards around panic buttons and digital mapping and have a data Center because we want to try to reduce violence and prevent the next school shooting. Unfortunately, we know that school shootings are continuing to happen. So, this work is so vitally important to get Alyssa’s Act signed into law by President Trump as soon as possible.”

Max Schachter has spent years creating a national school safety dashboard so that parents can know if there have been dangerous or violent incidents at their local schools. He served on a statewide commission after the shooting to investigate school safety.

“And throughout our investigation, we found that schools weren’t reporting incidents, specifically Marjory Stoneman Douglas was shoving everything under the rug,” he explained. “And so they were reporting zeros across the board. And then when I went to look at my other three kids’ schools, all the data was in a massive Excel spreadsheet, which just made it impossible for me to evaluate, compare, and understand. So Safe Schools for Alex, the charity that my wife and I started after the tragedy, we created the first of its kind school safety dashboard because when I sent Alex to school we had no idea that our children were going to school with a violent individual, an individual that had accumulated over 70 disciplinary referrals and law enforcement was at his house over 40 times. And so, parents have a right to know what’s happening in their school. So, we created this user-friendly dashboard for parents to use and to empower them with the knowledge so that they can become advocates and they can make sure that the schools are doing everything they can to reduce violence on campus, so this never happens again.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Riley Rourke, Matt Schooley

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    EASTHAM, Massachusetts (WBZ) — A search has been suspended on Cape Cod for a man who is still missing after falling through the ice while walking his dog with his wife on Saturday. The man’s wife was found dead and two police officers were hospitalized after they also fell into the frigid water in Eastham, Massachusetts.

Eastham Police received a call just after 9 a.m. on Saturday about a wet dog in distress at First Encounter Beach. An officer arrived and found a woman screaming for help in Bee’s River after falling through the ice.

The officer attempted to help the woman, but fell in during the rescue and was completely submerged. Another officer arrived and attempted to help the first officer, who had fallen in, but the ice broke, sending him plunging into the water up to his waist.

Both officers were able to get themselves back onto the shore, according to police. They were taken to Cape Cod Hospital to be evaluated for any injuries. There is no update on their condition.

A dive team began searching for the missing woman. During the search, they learned that the woman was on a walk with her husband and their dog at the time.

“Based on items located in their vehicle and a check of their residence, it was determined that it was possible that the husband may have fallen through the ice prior to the officer’s arrival,” Eastham Police said in a press release.

They found the woman’s body under the ice just after 11 a.m. on Saturday.

First responders searched through Saturday afternoon but did not find the man. On Sunday around 7 a.m., Eastham police and firefighters returned to Bee’s River and flew a drone for about two hours.

Crews also walked the area where ever the shoreline was accessible. After two hours, they were still unable to find the missing man.

“Additional search efforts will be conducted when changes to the ice conditions occur, allowing access for public safety personnel,” Eastham police said.

The name of the couple involved in the incident is not being released at this time.

David Norris lives in the area. He said because of the strong currents and salt water, he never walks on the ice.

“It’s just dangerous,” he said. “I have two dogs. I won’t bring them out here until summertime when it’s just sand, they can go on the beach. I would never let them go on the salt. There’s no boundaries to it. It’s just weak, you fall right in.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.